This story is part of The Dallas Morning News’ homicide project focused on sharing the stories of all people killed in Dallas in 2024.
The signature meal of Marcos Villanueva was a double crispy chicken sandwich, a side of fries, ketchup and a fountain Coke. He had one the night he was shot and killed while working at Church’s Texas Chicken.
Since the quiet 17-year-old’s death in February, the rest of the closing crew hasn’t been back to work at the Scyene Road store. They refuse. They transferred to a Church’s 12 miles west.
“Marcos was like our son,” said shift lead Veronica Reyes. She worked up to six days a week with the teen at the fast food chain, alongside her wife and daughter. They nagged at him to fix his taillight and fought for him when his hours got cut.
He wanted money to help his mom, Elizabeth Benitez, with the bills. He was her right-hand man, her pillar. He had dropped out of high school to help raise his two younger sisters. He took the girls to and from school each day before heading into Church’s at 4 p.m.
Benitez harped on him to finish school. “I told him I’d figure it out,” she said in Spanish.
“Mami no se preocupa, sigue adelante,” he assured her. Don’t worry, keep going.
“At times I feel responsible,” Benitez gasped through tears. “Maybe he was working toward something better.”
Every morning she walks by his room and her chest sinks. There are his clothes, his shoes, his beloved PlayStation he’d play all hours of the night with his cousins. He was the man of the house, Villanueva told his mother. “I’ll take care of you three.”
They cared for him, too, pouring laughter into his stoic demeanor, giggling until a smile swept across his face. As he walked into their apartment on his birthday a few Novembers ago, his sisters squealed and cheered while Benitez walked toward him with a chocolate-frosted cake. Two small flames topped it from a candle shaped “15.”
“Blow it out,” Benitez rallied. In one big exhale he did and hugged his mom.
Villanueva was short, stocky and in the two years Reyes knew Villanueva, got a haircut once. He kept the top long and the sides short. Reyes caught him checking himself out in the mirrors by the water machine.
In late November, Villanueva pooled together money to buy the family’s first Christmas tree at Family Dollar. He and his sisters decorated the artificial evergreen with drumstick ornaments from Church’s, multicolored lights and a star topper.
It’s one of the last family photos Benitez has, the four of them and Villanueva’s stepfather in front of the tree.
“He was a beautiful, good, boy,” Benitez said. “I don’t understand why this would happen to him.”
Reyes was off that evening in February when she got the call from their manager, Amalia Villa.
“Something very bad happened,” Villa said before telling Reyes she’d call back.
Reyes texted Villanueva, “Hey what happened?”
A man walked through the small dining area of Church’s toward the counter. He asked the woman at the register for Villanueva.
“What’s up man?” Villanueva said, as he walked toward the ordering window. The man pulled out a gun and shot Villanueva.
Villa has rewatched security footage in hopes of seeing something new. Maybe Villanueva got into an argument with a customer? He had few friends, much less enemies. “I will never understand until that guy says something,” Villa said.
Jeremy Grant, 22, faces a murder charge in the killing. He’s scheduled to stand trial mid-September.
Before the restaurant manager returned to the Scyene store the morning after the shooting, she stopped at Walmart. She would need bleach. Soggy fries and a watered-down Coke sat on the back table. She folded Villanueva’s gray and blue hoodie and put it aside for Benitez.
Behind the order counter, his drive-through headset was still on the ground. Villa cleaned off the earpiece, put it in a bag and tucked it away in storage.
“It’s going to stay there,” Villa said. “Just to have a memory.”
When school let out this summer, Villanueva’s sisters, ages 11 and 13, insisted they stay with their grandparents in Mexico. It’s what the three siblings would do nearly every year. It’s where Villanueva is buried.
The girls call Benitez to recount river walks with their grandparents and daily visits to their brother’s grave. School starts soon but they don’t want to come back to Dallas.
“They feel like they’re leaving him,” Benitez said.
Benitez is working with an immigration lawyer to try to join her daughters in Guerrero. She hasn’t returned to her home state since she left at 17, one month pregnant with Villanueva.
“I came to find a future for him, for his sisters, for my future,” Benitez said. “But, well, you see.”
